Five Questionsmatt broaddus

Both of these poems are part of a group of poems I’ve been working on recently. This year I developed and taught a course on literature and film of the black diaspora, and I think a lot of those ideas about history, transportation, dislocation, and community have made their way into these poems. I was reading about the history of the eastern coast of Africa while I was writing “Coconut Hands.” Zanj is the name given to that region by Arab traders going back at least 1,100 years. I wanted to write about that time and place, but of course I could only do that from my own time and place. The poem was made by me thinking about what has been lost and maybe what has been retained. What could I imagine? What were the limits of historical imagination and recreation (and language)? My partner Kodi gave me the title for that poem. I was going to call it “Coconut Islands” and she misread the title as “Coconut Hands,” and that immediately sounded better to me, so I went with that. “Pamphlet of Lightning” was about exploring what the shell was. There’s a shell in both poems. I had this image of the shell being sucked into the sky. The making of “Pamphlet of lightning” revolved around that image.

Do you write with a particular audience in mind?

I think I would freeze up if I wrote with a particular audience in mind. The poems will resonate with those who they resonate with. I appreciate the people who read my poems, but I don’t want to feel as if an imagined audience is dictating what I should be doing.

Do you prefer writing poems individually or in a series? Why?

I tend to write poems that I think of as related to each other. I often get obsessed with a formal structure, like the prose block or the couplet, and write a bunch of poems in that form. That’s what happened with my first chapbook, Space Station. And that’s what happened with “Coconut Hands” and “Pamphlet of lightning.” I like writing poems this way because writing with a structure in mind makes it easier for me to just get something down that fits the form and not worry so much about whether a particular poem works or not. If I’m not thrilled with something, I just write the next one.

How do you tend to utilize white space in a poem?

There’s something I like about language fragmented and oddly structured in a very condensed space. So I’ve tended to write poems without a lot of white space, poems that are little bursts. Recently I’ve become so obsessed with couplets that more white space is creeping into the poems I’m writing.

Do you workshop drafts with other poets?

I workshop sporadically with my partner, the poet Kodi Saylor. Every once in a while, we sit down together at our table and exchange new poems and give written and verbal feedback on them. It’s fun to have an excuse to talk about poems and how our writing is going. I’ve also had the honor of attending Cave Canem’s summer retreat the last three years as a fellow. It’s an intense experience, but it’s inspiring to be around a community of black poets that talented. In workshop, the fellows really encourage each other to take the next step and to do the things we’re scared to do in our writing. I always leave the retreat feeling super invigorated. And I’m typically able to carry that feeling over into the fall when I do a lot of writing.